RaveBOMB MagazineThe book becomes something like a florist’s memoir or a gardener’s companion rendered in gorgeous prose.
Jordan Castro
RaveBrooklyn RailCompact, brilliant, and very funny ... Determinedly accurate and not a little uncanny ... If all of this sounds a little grim, it is. Kind of ... But also it’s exuberant, light at all the right times, and very, very funny. Castro closely catalogs nearly every step of his narrator’s writing process ... The Novelist pays explicit homage to its major influences ... The Novelist finds its comedy in the new self-hobbling patterns spawned by social media. Which are not exceptional for Castro, or for his novelist. Perhaps this is why the novel is so affecting. We know its sting. We are complicit. Technology is taking our attention, too.
Susan Taubes
RaveThe Washington Post... I have rarely read a novel as death-haunted as this one. This is the story of a failing marriage, yes, but also the account of a cracking consciousness, both in the sense of its literary liveliness and the sense of a mind becoming unmoored and increasingly consumed by suicidal ideation ... Indeed, Divorcing courts death. Which is not to say literary necro-leaning is its only aspect. Nor is it dour. Divorcing is often very funny, always alive, bursting with ideas, full of formal vitality and change ... this feels like a book both stuffed with fiction and nonfiction, memory and play ... Taubes has a fierce imagination and perspective ... One can’t help but read Taubes’s creation in Blind as a self-referential act, what some might call auto-fiction, but this is more exciting and tangled than that usually promises. Taubes took her own life just a few weeks after the book was published, unfortunately. “Divorcing” serves as a singular epitaph, a once missing, now welcome, brilliant work of late modernism.
Esme Weijun Wang
RaveLos Angeles Times\"... unnervingly excellent ... [Wang\'s] essays are all varied lenses on what it is to be one kind of human, to be schizoaffective, to be her. As a whole, The Collected Schizophrenias provides a new and welcome map for the severe landscapes of schizoaffective disorder, of cerebral disease, diagnosis, recovery, and relapse, of the many human mysteries of the schizophrenias. The essays are resoundingly intelligent, often unexpectedly funny, questioning, fearless and peerless, as Wang makes for brilliant company on 13 difficult walks through largely uncharted territory.\
Jeff Jackson
RaveThe Los Angeles Times\"... crackingly ambitious ... [The book\'s form] prepares the reader for a novel that is formally complex, experimental, poetic, puzzling, often uncomfortable, at times dizzying, always alive, beautifully written and just plain daring ... Destroy All Monsters dares pair a most troubling aspect of contemporary life in the United States, mass shootings and the proliferation of guns, with the romantic desire for \'danger\' that runs in the blood of rock ’n’ roll... It’s a risky idea, unsettling, and plausibly offensive; one might even call it dangerous. Which is pretty rock ’n’ roll, if you ask me.\
Sara Gallardo, trans. by Jessica Sequeira
RaveLos Angeles TimesIt is tempting to file the remarkable stories in Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke under \'magic realism\' and close the drawer. But that would be an incomplete reading of the collection and a misreading of the genre, an elastic label that offers a rather easy recipe for critics — have people; add wings. Which is not to say Gallardo’s fiction has no wings ... The story suggests a blurry moral and reads like a highly orchestrated dream. Gallardo, on the other hand, wants us to believe ... Frankly, not much happens, and it’s only two pages long. But it flies. Almost a sketch, the story achieves a brief, uncanny completeness, which proves typical of the nearly fifty more (very) short stories in the collection. Read them sequentially and they accrue something more than magic, they radiate a marvelously strange mythopoetic intensity. The book is a bible.
Javier Marias, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
RaveThe Los Angeles Times\"...[an] erudite, strange, hypnotic and beautiful, frustrating book ... one doesn’t really read Marías for plot. One reads him for the language, the elegant hypnotic voice, the philosophical digressions and observations, for his long and winding sentences ... I found myself most loving the book for its pages, brilliant observations, its musings and its suspenseful elegant voice, rather than the overarching story. And I could not put it down.\
